Tag Archives: cyberattack

Cyberlaw Podcast alumnus Marten Mickos was called before the Senate Commerce Committee to testify about HackerOne’s bug bounty program. But the unhappy star of the hearings was Uber, which was heavily criticized for having paid out a large bonus under cloudy circumstances. Sen. Blumenthal and others on the Hill treated the payment as more ransom than bounty… Continue Reading

Episode 192: Discussion with Michael Sulmeyer and Nicholas Weaver With the Texas church shooting having put encryption back on the front burner, I claim that Apple is becoming the FBI’s crazy ex-girlfriend in Silicon Valley — and offer the tapes to prove it. When Nick Weaver rises to Apple’s defense, I point out that Apple responded… Continue Reading

Episode 190: Interview with United States Senator Sheldon Whitehouse In our 190th episode Stewart Baker has a chance to interview United States Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has a long history of engagement with technology and security issues. In this episode, we spend a remarkably detailed half-hour with him, covering the cybersecurity waterfront, from the FBI’s… Continue Reading

Episode 181: Equifax and the Upside of Nation-State Cyberattacks Was the Equifax breach a nation-state attack? Nick Weaver parses the data, and I explore the surprising upside for Equifax if it was. Twitter comes to Capitol Hill to talk Russian election interference; it goes home with a flea in its ear and plenty of homework… Continue Reading

Episode 173: Interview with Richard Ledgett Today we deliver the second half of our bifurcated holiday podcast with an interview of Richard Ledgett, recently retired from his tour as NSA’s deputy director. We cover much recent history, from Putin’s election adventurism to questions about whether NSA can keep control of the cyberweapons it develops. Along the… Continue Reading

172: The Self-Referential Episode In this news-only episode, we cover the irresistible story of the week: Trump, Russia, and the Media. It’s especially irresistible for us because we’ve had two of the protagonists on as guests. I make the bold prediction that Shane Harris’s stories on Russia collusion and the Trump campaign will be seen as… Continue Reading

Episode 171. Implants in the Kremlin’s Snack Machines? Our guest, Ellen Nakashima, was coauthor of a Washington Post article that truly is a first draft of history, though not a chapter the Obama administration is likely to be proud of. She and Greg Miller and Adam Entous chronicle the story of Russia’s information operations attack… Continue Reading

Episode 170 This week’s episode is a news roundup without interview. We lead with the Senate’s overwhelming adoption of unexpectedly tough Russia sanctions along with the Iran sanctions bill. The mainstream press has emphasized that the bill will lock the Obama sanctions into legislation, but Anthony Rapa explains that the bigger story is just how… Continue Reading

Episode 165 is a WannaCry Festivus celebration, as The Airing of Grievances overtakes The Patching of Old Machines. Michael Vatis joins me in identifying all the entities who’ve been blamed for WannaCry, starting with Microsoft for not patching Windows XP until after the damage was done. (We exonerate Microsoft on that count.) Another candidate for… Continue Reading

Episode 164: Stewart on the Road to Tarsus Episode 164 features Stewart Baker’s startling change of heart on the question of cyberspace norms. Credit goes to our interview guest, Tim Maurer, Fellow and co-director of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And perhaps as well to Brian Egan, former Legal… Continue Reading

155: Debating Hackback Episode 155 of the podcast offers something new: equal time for opposing views. Well, sort of, anyway. In place of our usual interview, we’re running a debate over hacking back that CSIS sponsored last week. I argue that US companies should be allowed to hack back; I’m opposed by Greg Nojeim, Senior… Continue Reading

Vlad’s Botox Fresh off a redeye from Israel, I interview Matthew Green of the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. Security news from the internet of things grows ever grimmer, we agree, but I get off the bus when Matt and the EFF try to solve the problem with free speech law. In the news roundup,… Continue Reading

We ask Rihanna to sum up the latest US-EU agreement: And that’s when you need me there With you I’ll always share … You can stand under my umbrella RiRi’s got the theory right: The Umbrella Agreement was supposed to make sure the US and EU would always share law enforcement data. But when the… Continue Reading

In this week’s episode, we guess at the near-term future with Betsy Cooper and Steve Weber of UC Berkeley’s Center for Long Term Cybersecurity. In all of their scenarios, the future is awash in personal data; the only question is how it’s used. I argue that it will be used to make us fall in… Continue Reading

Jonathan Zittrain, who holds a surfeit of titles at Harvard, is our guest for episode 136. Among other topics, we explore the implications of routine doxing of political adversaries. Along the way I extract kind words from Jonathan for Sarah Palin and welcome him to the club of those who think mass doxxers are evil punks. … Continue Reading

Our guest for the episode is Rob Silvers, the assistant secretary for cybersecurity policy at DHS. He talks about what the government can and should do about newly potent DDOS attacks and the related problem of the Internet of Things. The only good news: insecure debrillators and pacemakers may kill you, but they haven’t yet been… Continue Reading

John Carlin leaves Justice: We give him the good news and the bad news. Episode 134 features John Carlin’s swan song as assistant attorney general for national security. We review the highs and lows of his tenure from a cybersecurity point of view and then look to the future, including how the US should respond… Continue Reading

A record-setting insecurity week. Our interview in episode 131 is with Matt Cutts and Lisa Wiswell from the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service. Matt joined the Digital Service from Google where he authored their SafeSearch content filter. Lisa is a bureaucracy hacker with the Defense Digital Service and previously spent years working on cyber-warfare in DOD’s… Continue Reading

The podcast is back with a bang from hiatus. Our guest, Scott DePasquale, is the CEO of Utilidata, an electric utility IoT and cybersecurity company. Scott talks about his contribution to the Internet Security Alliance’s upcoming book, The Cyber Security Social Contract. Episode 128 also brings you a news roundup from the most momentous August… Continue Reading

127: Vlad’s Cojones I know we promised to take August off, but I was inspired by the flap over the DNC hack and the fact that I’m at the Aspen Homeland Security Working Group meeting in Colorado. I waylaid two former intelligence community members on the Aspen campus and asked for their views on the… Continue Reading

Episode 126 – The podcast goes to the conventions If Vladimir Putin can do it, so can we. This week the podcast dives deep into the US presidential campaign. I of course talk with Maury Shenk about evidence that the Russians are behind “Guccifer 2.0” and the DNC data leak – aided by a Wikileaks… Continue Reading

In the news roundup, Michael Vatis covers Microsoft’s surprising Second Circuit victory over the Justice Department in litigation over a warrant for data stored in Ireland. The hidden issue in that case was data localization – the same issue driving the Justice Department’s new legislative proposal to allow foreign nations to obtain information from US… Continue Reading

Ransomware is the new black. In fact, it’s the new China. So says our guest for episode 116, Dmitri Alperovitch, the CTO and co-founder of CrowdStrike. Dmitri explains why ransomware is so attractive financially – and therefore likely to get much worse very fast. He and I also explore the implications and attribution of the… Continue Reading

Stewart Baker

Stewart served as the first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security where he set cybersecurity policy, including inward investment reviews focused on network security. More

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Steptoe Cyberblog, with its sometimes contrasting insights, serves up opinionated and provocative thoughts on the issues — especially cybersecurity and privacy — that arise at the intersection of law, information technology, and security.

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